Annual Archives

Kate Brown is a leading historian of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, specializing in environmental history, the history of science and technology, and spatial history. In her latest book, Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, she provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Kate Brown lives in Washington, DC and is an Associate Professor of History at UMBC. She is the author of A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard 2004) which won among a handful of prizes including the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize for the Best Book in International European History. Brown has published articles in the American Historical Review, Slate, Aeon, Chronicle of Higher Education, Harper's on-line edition, Kritika, and the TLS. She is a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, and has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research, the International Research and Exchange Board, the Eurasia Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Harvard University's Davis Center, and the Kennan Institute in Washington, DC. Currently Brown is working on a collection of essays called Being There, about the hapless adventures of an historian trying to recover the lost histories of modernist wastelands.